CHAPTER FOUR
AUSCHWITZ
IT is necessary now to retrace our steps in time so as to introduce a number of persons whose lives became part of our story. The following two chapters consist of their history before they joined us. It was taken down directly from them, translated, and the facts checked from the official records as far as possible.
Near Spisske Podradhie in Slovakia there was a little farm owned by a man called Krantz. He was a Jew. One day in 1941 there was a loud knocking at the door. He opened it and saw four men standing there, in the uniforms of the new Slovak Guardists.
‘We’ve come for Hermina, your daughter,’ they said. ‘We have instructions to round up all Jewish women.’
‘But she is only twenty-two,’ her father said.
Hermina heard them, fled and hid herself in the cellar. The men came in. Her parents wailed, and she, seeing that she must be caught, came out and gave herself up. They seized her. Her mother fell down unconscious and lay across the hall. One man kicked her as he passed. They put the girl in a truck with many others.
She looked out back at her house, her home. The last Guardist came out and banged the door. In the house next door the Rabbi lived. Now she saw him at the window and he saw her. One of the other girls, observing this, cried, ‘Hermina always has all the luck. The Rabbi has saluted her, that means that she’ll come home again.’
The truck lurched forward, throwing the girls against one another with bruising force and they were off upon their journey, where to they knew not, nor what to expect. They only knew that they were girls, defenceless amidst a world which seemed all fear.
First they were taken to a Jewish ‘collecting centre’. She was left in a room with eighty others for three weeks. Here they were treated and fed like hated animals, such as the pig that men call dirty. Every gesture of those that guarded them showed disdain and contempt. They were not allowed to go outside. They were made to clean the pans of the lavatories with their hands while the guards yelled ‘Saubande!’ They had to cringe to their persecutors for the smallest necessities of life.
A train of cattle trucks arrived. The Guardists came in to fetch the girls. ‘Heraus, heraus, Saubande,’ they cried. Hermina was sitting on a stool too small to seat her comfortably. She did not rise at once. A Guardist, seeing this, aimed a kick at her, striking her protruding rump. The moment that he raised his foot he must have seen a fat, pasty-looking Jewess, sitting. The next, he was confronted by a yelling female creature that clawed, spat and shouted all at once. Before this the Guardist, being a male, retreated, covering up his face. They left her alone after that.
The journey was long and hard, and the women were glad when the S.S. men, who had taken over at the Polish frontier, bade them get out and walk, taking their luggage with them. Hermina had two heavy suitcases full of all her clothes. She struggled on, three miles, her fat arms numb with pain. At last they halted before a gate above which a notice read Auschwitz.
Once in the camp they had to hand over all they had, were stripped naked, all hair shaved off, made to bath in a foul communal concrete tank and dress again in blood-stained blouses taken from the Russian dead. While they were thus employed, the S.S. guard pointed at this and that secret place of each girl, and laughed and took photographs. Then the women were marched to their quarters where their new life was to begin. The place consisted of army huts, and two hundred were crowded into each.
Next day the regular camp routine commenced. At 3 a.m. they were roused. They put on their thin garment and were lined up on the snowy ground outside. ‘Heads up, hands down,’ shouted the S.S. guard. They waited fearfully, not knowing what was going to happen this first morning. Later they got used enough to torture one. But this first day the wait seemed endless. Roll-call was taken, but still they stood, their legs numb with the freezing cold. At last, it was 6 a.m., they heard a shout: ‘Achtung, achtung.’ Now ‘commandos’ (working parties) were formed. Hermina was sent to join one formed of Slovak Jews. ‘You’re no Slovak Jew,’ they shouted in anger when she came up; ‘you’re only a dirty Polish Jew.’ They threw her out and she had to go to another commando.
They were marched off about six miles. Here, their duty of the day was to load lorries with stones. Each lorry had to be filled in seven minutes. If they rested they were lashed by the guards behind.
At six o’clock they reached the camp again, were given half a pint of thick soup and thus to bed.
Soon routine was established and discipline maintained by leaders taken from among their own ranks. These soon became themselves little tyrants. Emma was one of these, a thick-set, greedy girl. She distributed the soup. All were hungry, all the time, so Emma ruled, and woe to those who did not please her or had not gifts to offer.
Soon they learned their way around. A red triangle on the arm meant the bearer was a political prisoner, green a murderer, black a whore, purple a Bibelforscher.1 Each ‘type’ worked together in separate commandos.
As spring came and then summer, the work varied from time to time. Some German, thinking how better to torture the women of the camp, one day decided that the swamp which lay to one side might well be cleaned and drained. Here Hermina was put to work. Often she was submerged above the shoulders in the muddy water as she struggled to slash the rushes with the sickle which she held:—into the water, out of the water, in again; if they held back the S.S. sent the dogs to harry them. One day she slipped and cut her leg with the sickle and when she did not leap back into the water the man shouted to the dog, ‘Mensch, greif’ den Hund!’ (Fellow, bite that dog) and so she had to plunge in again. The water was full of leeches which sucked her blood and irritated the wound, which now became inflamed, and poison spread up her leg. For some days she limped on, but at last she could stand no more, reported sick and was taken to the hospital. Here her leg soon mended, but in the crowded ward she caught a fever which kept her there for some six weeks.
So life went on in Auschwitz while the armies of the Reich marched away from Germany across the lands they had conquered one by one. And as they went so they gathered up the Jewish folk, the gipsies and all who opposed their new order by political means and sent them back to work in concentration camps.
Thousands grew into hundreds of thousands, then into millions. At last it was decided that the ordinary ‘wear and tear’ of concentration
camp life was not sufficient to keep the numbers down or eliminate the Jews quickly enough, and further steps must be taken. But how to do the job?—that was the question. Soldiers argued the efficacy of the machine-gun. Well used, they said, that weapon could accomplish marvels. But all guns are bloody things, and with their noise cause panic. Difficulties were pointed out, some might escape, be half killed and have to be shot again and so on. Finally some one, perhaps it was the Führer himself, decided that the professor’s plan was best. Hcn, prussic acid gas, as it is commonly known, surely was the most efficient means to use; rapid, silent, it would save much physical and mental suffering among those to be eliminated.
Hermina was convalescent when the first ‘inspection’ took place in the hospital at Auschwitz. They were all in bed when suddenly the door of the ward was opened wide and the doctor, Herr Muller, came in followed by a secretary. All the patients were ordered to get out of bed and stand up. The doctor passed down the ward, picking out patients as he went, their numbers being written down by the secretary. He stopped before Hermina.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Hermina Krantz, Herr Doctor.’
‘What’s wrong with you?’
‘Only a cold,’
‘Can you work?’
‘Oh, certainly, Herr Doctor.’
‘Very good, get up then.’
He passed on down the line selecting as he went. At the end of the ward he turned and addressed those whom he had selected. ‘Children,’ he said, ‘I am sending you all off to a very nice sanatorium where you will be treated very well and will recover quickly. Now get ready at once, because the men are waiting outside.’
The people made what haste they could and struggled to get ready quickly. Some were very weak after long illnesses and bad food, and some had immobilizing hurts. When the doctor with his encouraging words had gone, a couple of S.S. guards entered. They did not use kind words, but bullied and beat the sick into a large, black, covered lorry which stood at the door.
Hermina sat on the end of her bed. ‘Why do the S.S. hit them if they are going to a sanatorium,’ she said. ‘I wonder where they’re really going.’
‘Dear child,’ replied an elderly woman who wore a green triangle on her sleeve, ‘they go to a place there’s no coming back from.’
And so they did. They were driven some miles in the lorry to a sandy place where stood a newly finished house. Here they were taken out and told that they were going to have a nice bath. They were grateful, because the lice and dirt in the Lager had been very hard to bear. So they got out with little fuss and entered the building. The S.S. men who guarded them, pushed them and shouted, ‘Heraus, heraus,’ but little more. Now each Jew was given a towel and a piece of soap. Undressing quickly, they passed into a second room, nicely appointed with mirrors and apparent showers. The doors were closed behind them. It seemed a little queer, this crowding in a bathroom, but they were used to crowds, and the Germans anyhow did things that way. Few thoughts had time to pass across their minds, however, before the gas was liberated. One gasp and they could move no more. They fell, writhed a moment and were still. Within four minutes all was silence and those who looked through the glass windows saw that the professor’s plan worked just as he had described it would. Then the gas was pumped out, the doors opened and the bodies of these sick, old and weak Jews taken out, through another door, on to other trollies and hurried to a place with high, smoking chimneys and furnaces with steel doors, on which were iron stretchers that fitted each furnace comfortably. On to each a corpse was thrown, the door slid back and then into the flames shot the poor thing that but a few minutes before had been the clothing of a human soul.
The selections had started, and from now on they were part of the routine of life and death in Auschwitz. The Germans played the bath-house game for all that it was worth. It saved a lot of work, screaming and struggle, in getting the people there. As time went on, however, it became difficult to play the game effectively. Besides, those in charge became brutalized beyond all human comprehension. They seemed to have lost their very souls and to be possessed by devils, giving themselves up utterly to cruelty.
Even when further subterfuge could serve no purpose, the leaders of the camp still played the selection game. One of the doctors, Klein, a thin, tall man with mad eyes shining from a wicked face, still picked out the weak, the sick and any that he wished to die. Kramer, thick-set, short and powerful, assuming a Napoleonic stance upon the platform at the railway station, his right-hand fingers thrust between the breast buttons of his tunic, selected with his thumb those for immediate gassing and those for temporary reprieve. Hössler, small, Hitler-moustached, savage and weak, ably assisted, while Drechsel, the rabbit-toothed woman, and Irma Grese, young, fair and almost pretty, ruled the S.S. women’s corps, walking about the Lager with whips and huge police dogs. (The latter was then little more than twenty years of age. She had been a timid schoolgirl a few years before, very much frightened of the other girls in her class. Then she had joined the Hitler youth in emotional defiance to her father’s orders. The next step was the S.S. women’s corps. Then they sent her to Auschwitz, later to Belsen, where she was captured and tried at Lüneburg and hanged for murder.)
It seemed to satisfy something in their psychology, this power of life and death. Their underlings, picked sadists, also gave their natures the full pleasure of inflicting pain and causing death. One, Moll, a sergeant-major, who was in charge of one of the crematoria, not content with having corpses shovelled into the flames, used to stand and beckon men to come to him and strike them down or shoot them with his silencer and then cremate them for his own personal satisfaction. Others, whose power was less, would with-hold food or drag some hapless person out because he was seen eating a stolen slice of bread, bend him across a bar and beat him, while another called out ‘Eins, zwei, drei…’ up to twenty-five, and then start counting all over again. Any who escaped and were caught were brought into the centre of the camp and hanged on gibbets but a few feet off the ground. All had to watch them writhe and die while the camp band played waltzes and jazz. They kept a certain block, No. 25, as a communal condemned cell for those who had been put upon the list to die and sent them there for two or four or six days before taking them on to the gas-house. Here they were kept without food, often without water. There were no lavatories within the hut, and none were allowed to go out. The people in other huts around could hear them wailing in the night and crying out for water.
In the end all pretence was given up and the place became a human abattoir. Now people, stripped naked, were crushed together into lorries and driven rapidly to the gas chambers where the lorries were tipped up, flinging the living mass out in a heap. Then, as each struggled to his feet he was beaten, kicked and lashed into the gas chamber till it could hold no more when the door was banged to and the gas let in. Week after week, month after month, the murder of the Jews went on. It was beyond reason, beyond imagination, beyond belief of people who lived in lands where murder was a crime. Even now there are people in Geneva, Boston, Manchester, Stockholm, Johannesburg, Dublin and other far-off towns who say this whole story was invented by some morbid propagandist out of a disordered mind. But to Hermina the nightmare was all too true. After she had escaped the first selection she was sent to Birkenau, another camp of wooden huts, some two miles away, where four crematoria had been constructed. A leather factory they were said to be by the S.S. guards. There in the autumn of 1942, when the leaves were falling, a new form of selection was tried which had been invented by some S.S. personage of ingenuity.
Hermina, together with thousands of others, was lined up on a Sunday afternoon at 2 p.m. There they stood in five long lines. Terror was with them. This was the end, they felt. A count was taken. Then spades were produced and they were made to dig trenches 
feet deep and 
feet across. ‘Our graves,’ the people murmured as they dug. ‘Not likely,’ some one said,’ they don’t waste bullets on us.’
Now for the rest of the day they stood there without food, without water, waiting. Around the field was an electrified barbed-wire fence. After some hours Hermina saw two Dutch Jewesses leave the standing multitude and walk resolutely up to the wire, grasp it and die.
At last a German called Schwarz, a large, blue-eyed, nordic man, rode up on a horse. He shouted dirty words at them. ‘We’re finished now.’ Hermina thought. He shouted orders and the guards obeyed, arranging each line of people before a ditch. ‘Jump! Jump!’ Schwarz yelled. And helped by lashes, Hermina and the others tried to leap across the ditches that they’d dug. Their wooden shoes were heavy and slippery. It was difficult to jump from their standing position, particularly after such a wait, when all were stiff with cold. Many also were weak and sick, and so numbers failed to get across and fell back into the trenches. The names of these were taken and they were marked down for death.
Hermina reached the other side and was then allowed to go back to her hut. There she just sat down too tired, too horror-struck to eat or think.
Next day again the gong sounded in the early hours, again she waited for the dawn, more than three hours, again she was marched off, nearly ten miles away to work. Suddenly as she was standing on one side of a road, she saw a working party of men approach and start to work at the other side. Amongst them she saw a face she thought she knew. It had long, high cheek-bones, sunken eyes and seemed all nose. It was her brother, she was almost sure.
‘Eugen,’ she called, ‘Eugen.’ The man looked back, half dazed, but made no sign. At last a rest was called. She stepped across the road and went to him. He looked up, still half knowing.
‘’Tis me, Hermina.’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Oh, Eugen, Eugen,’ she cried, ‘I am your sister.’
‘I know,’ he said, ‘I know—’
They stood silently on the road. ‘I wish that I could die,’ was all he said. She looked with horror at his lost, hopeless face. She took his hand. He did not move, nor showed emotion but just stood there. Then she stepped back and screamed, and turned and ran screaming down the road. She never saw him again.
Days passed, weeks went by; months came and went, but still she lived. She pinched her cheeks to make them look rosy when the doctor passed along the lines. She lived, but that was all. One day when standing for the roll-call in the dawn, she felt her head was light and that day she shivered all the time. She worked, but staggered as she worked. She hardly knew she walked as they marched her back to the camp as evening drew near. That night she lay in a high fever, delirious. It was typhus that she had. They brought her to the hospital and there she lay. ‘That I might die now.’ she thought, ‘and not be alive to face the gas death.’ But no, soon there was an ‘inspection day’ at the hospital and the doctor and the registrar came round. He passed along the beds, stopping at each. Each patient was made hold out her tongue. If it did not look healthy, he had her put upon the list for gassing. He came to Hermina’s bed.
‘Zeig deine Zunge,’ he said. She obeyed. He pursed his lips. ‘Dein Nummer?’ he asked. The secretary seized her arm and copied down the number tattooed there.
Soon the black lorry was at the door. Hermina was taken out and put in it. She found herself at the back. She always had had a quick mind, and now as the lorry checked while crossing a canal bridge on the way to the gas-house she saw an opportunity to escape from the immediate peril. She managed to slip over the back of the lorry, and got into the reeds by the water without being observed. There she crouched. But what was she to do? There was no food, no hope of getting anywhere and she was weak after the fever and very tired. Fear kept her there for more than a day, but at last her body’s needs drove her out and half-unconsciously she crept back to her bed at the hospital and once more lay down and slept. The doctor did not come round again for a week. Meanwhile they fed her, apparently having forgotten who she was. Being strong beyond the normal she regained much of her health, and when at last the doctor did appear she was very much better.
‘Well, well,’ he said, stopping at the bed, ‘I seem to have seen you before. I thought I sent you to the sanatorium.’
‘Oh, yes,’ she said, ‘but I’ve come back again and now I’m well again and I want to work.’
He looked faintly surprised but passed her by without further remark. She was ordered out and made to work in the worst commando, with the whores. They had to smooth out the surfaces of roads with their hands.
An abscess broke under one of her teeth and she went to see the ‘dentist’. The latter, another prisoner, managed to extract the tooth with some difficulty. He explained that he wasn’t really a dentist at all but had said that he was so as to get a job in the hospital. ‘After all,’ he said, ‘anybody can pull out a tooth or so.’ Hermina held her aching jaw, but agreed pleasantly. The man liked her and, using some influence he had, got her taken on temporarily as a nurse in the hospital. This was in the spring of 1943. Then, for a time, things weren’t quite so bad. There was a new doctor in the hospital who did his best. His selections were very small. He held his ground against Hössler who complained that the hospital was full of Musulmen,1 who should have been gassed instead of just lying there. Towards August, Hössler won his point and the doctor was sent on leave. The new ‘physician’ had no such qualms, and he and Hössler had a field day, weeding out all the
1 Lager-slang for skeletons—the diet was so small that many people gradually became emaciated and presented an appearance resembling a skeleton covered merely by skin.
sick, the weak, the old and the very young. But now Hermina was not paraded any more because she was a nurse and so escaped again.
She worked under a German girl called Orla Reichert, imprisoned herself for communism. Orla treated her well and saw that she was not molested. So life went on again. The urgency of terror faded a little from her mind and time passed without her noticing the days.
One morning she picked up a bundle of aprons needing ironing and went across to the kitchen. There she saw another woman working.
‘Can you give me an iron to do these things?’ Hermina said. The girl looked up. She was plump, with rounded curves everywhere and a round smiling face in which were set two dark, beautiful and splendid eyes beneath a high brow. Fair curls hung from her well-poised head. ‘Come in,’ she said, ‘sit down and have some soup.’ Hermina came forward, sat down by the table and took the offered bowl.
‘My name is Luba Tryszynska,’ the other said. And then they talked, telling each other all their hopes and fears, comparing notes on all that had happened to them. Luba had been born away to the east in White Russia, near Brest-Litovsk, where her father had owned a fair-sized farm. He had sixteen horses, Luba remembered. She had had six brothers and sisters. They were a good big family, too big for the house, so her father had married her off to a nearby Polish farmer when she was only sixteen. They all lived close together. In 1940 the Germans came and their troubles started. The Ukraine Germans murdered her father and her mother. They threw them along with many others into a pit, flung in hand grenades and then filled it in.
For a time Luba with her Polish husband and her baby managed to evade capture, but not for long. They were caught and together with seventy other local Jews were sent to Auschwitz. On arrival, her husband was separated from her and put in the men’s camp. She was sent with her baby to the women’s quarters. Next day they were paraded. Most of the mothers with their babies were immediately despatched to the gas chambers. The S.S. looked at Luba, however, with appraising eyes, pinched her, and said she was too good a thing to burn just then. But they took her little son from her. She begged to be allowed to go with him to death, thinking she might hold him to her heart so that he would not fear even when the gas was choking him. But no, they tore him from her arms. ‘Mother,’ he cried, the only word he knew. They put him in the death wagon and drove him away, and left her there, alone. She could not die, she was too strong, too near the earth. And so in another quarter of the camp she endured the same routine as Hermina had for months and years. To begin with, she had occasionally seen her husband who was in the men’s camp. But one day they found the fifty dollars that she had sewn into the lining of his trousers. They took him then and strapped him to a board and beat his strong body, till he cried out to God for help, and then they beat him into quietness. When he had struggled back to painful life, they sent him to work with the gang in the crematorium itself, shovelling the gassed corpses of his fellow-inmates into the furnaces, some dead, some still half-alive. For a long period he was kept there enclosed by barbed wire, surrounded by mounds of dead bodies, always with the stench about him of burning human flesh. He was a tough Pole, she proudly said, and one day when she had been allowed to visit him he told her how he planned to blow up the crematorium with dynamite that he had obtained some way. The plan was to use the moment when some Allied air-raid was in progress and the S.S. men in the shelters. Shortly afterwards one night she heard a loud explosion and saw high flames coming from the direction of the crematoria. She waited and waited. Day followed day. Her mind could not rest; her body longed for his. Was he alive? Had he been crushed by the explosion he had made? At last news came. He and his friends had got out, but had been shot four miles away.
She told how then she also had met Orla who had befriended her as well, and got her into the hospital kitchen at no little personal risk, where for some time she had been working—but oh, how she hated Auschwitz! If only, if only she could get away, anywhere from the awful memories which pursued her here——
From now on the two girls were inseparable. They managed to get into the same block. They worked together. They suffered together. Together they were forced to drag out the bodies of those who died at night in the huts, week in, week out. Finally they got on the regular staff of the hospital as nurses, which gave them a degree of security. But Luba could not endure Auschwitz. She persuaded Hermina to apply with her, as nurses, for transfer. For months nothing happened. Then suddenly, in November 1944, a message came through from the doctor at Belsen Lager asking for four nurses to be sent at once. Luba and Hermina were amongst those chosen.